23Feb16

China Maintains Respect, and a Museum, for a U.S. General

Early in his tenure as commander of the United States' World War II mission
in China, Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell expressed a grudging fondness for the
damp, ramshackle capital deep in the country's southwest that would be his
base for the next several years.

"Chungking isn't half bad when the sun shines," the plain-spoken general
wrote in his diary, using the spelling of the period. But his tolerance for the
underserviced, refugee-laden town perched high above the Yangtze River did
not last.

A year later, he composed a five-stanza poem that went, in part:

"The garbage is rich, as it rots in the ditch, / And the honey-carts scatter
pollution."

By the time General Stilwell was recalled to the United States in the fall of
1944, he grumbled that Washington was "as big a pile of manure as
Chungking was."

Still, that unflattering take on Chongqing, now a metropolis of 30 million, has
not stopped a wellspring of local pride and scholarship about General Stilwell,
the American military hero who was sent by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to
help the Chinese battle the Japanese.

A museum dedicated to General Stilwell opened here more than 20 years ago
in the gray-stone, flat-roofed house set in a garden of palm trees where the
general lived and worked. Scholars in Chongqing say that when William J.
Perry, then the defense secretary, came for the opening of the museum in
1994, his plane was the first American aircraft to touch down here since the
victory of the Communists in 1949.

In a sign of the official respect for General Stilwell, the Chongqing municipal
government runs the museum.

One of the epic personality battles of the war played out here: Two stubborn
and hostile men, General Stilwell and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader,
vied for the affection of the American president, even though they were
supposed to be allies. General Stilwell openly referred to Chiang as "Peanut"
and railed against his corruption, complaining that it left conscripts starving in
the streets of Chongqing.

Dark wood furniture, a sepia-toned wall map of the region in the conference
area and a spartan dining table where General Stilwell entertained make it
easy to envision what went on in the modest rooms. Other touches — a gray
steel Remington typewriter, a glass-fronted bookcase behind the general's
desk and a wood-framed bed — are of the period but did not belong to the
general, according to his grandson, John Easterbrook.

The photos on the walls reflect the intrigue of a city that was not only an
encampment for American military and government advisers who dealt with
Chiang but also home to a small cell of Communists led by Zhou Enlai, later
the first premier of the People's Republic of China, who stayed not far from
General Stilwell's house.

It was, wrote Theodore H. White, Time magazine's correspondent in China,
"as if the ablest and most devoted executives of New York, Boston and
Washington had been driven from home to set up resistance to an enemy from
the hills of Appalachia."

The most striking images in the Stilwell museum are grainy black-and-white
shots of the grim-faced generals, Stilwell and Chiang, that capture their frosty
relationship. They both stand ramrod straight, rail thin and staring ahead, with
the fashionably dressed Madame Chian g Kai-shek sandwiched between them
as a chic intermediary — though not always trustworthy, from the American's
point of view.

After coming to power, the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge
the help the United States had given China in defeating the Japanese, a
reaction to American support for Chiang during the civil war. But that attitude
changed in the 1990s, and now the American role has become part of the
standard version of the war.

General Stilwell's low regard for Chiang, who lost to the Communists and fled
to Taiwan in 1949, has contributed to his high standing in China.

In the Stilwell papers, now housed at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University, the general refers to the Communist program as: "Reduce taxes,
rents, interest. Raise production, and standard of living." The government of
Chiang, he wrote, was riddled with "greed, corruption, favoritism, more taxes, a
ruined currency, terrible waste of life, callous disregard of all the rights of
man."

"Stilwell was very unhappy with the Kuomintang soldiers and the situation in
the war," said Zhou Yong, the director in Chongqing of the Research Center
for the Great Rear Area During the Anti-Japanese War, using the Chinese
word for the Nationalists.

"But that was the reality of China at the time," said Mr. Zhou, who has visited
the United States and Taiwan to pursue his research on wartime Chongqing.
General Stilwell, he said, "had to find a new force to win the war, and the new
force was the Communist Party."

General Stilwell, he noted, wanted the Communists under Mao Zedong to
have a share equal to Chiang's of the American supply of fighting equipment,
known as Lend-Lease. The sharing never came to pass: Chiang outfoxed the
American he never trusted, and persuaded Roosevelt to bring the general
home.

Among scholars here, the unforgiving attitude toward Chiang that prevailed in
the early years of Communist rule has softened, and now, credit is given to his
troops for helping to keep the Japanese at bay.

"There's a transformation in China's study of this part of history," said Tan
Gang, an associate professor at Southwest University in Chongqing. "It used
to be that if scholars mentioned the Kuomintang, they would criticize it. Now,
we can see the Kuomintang more objectively."

It was understandable, Mr. Tan said, that Chiang loathed General Stilwell and
worked to undermine him. "Stilwell often criticized Chiang Kai-shek publicly,
and his words were very nasty," Mr. Tan said. "It embarrassed Chiang
Kai-shek — that's why he didn't like him."

Though the general was known as "Vinegar Joe," and his language left an
indelible image of a rough-talking boss, his diaries were mostly a means of
letting off steam, Mr. Easterbrook said by telephone from his home near San
Jose, Calif. The general would most want to be remembered as a stalwart
supporter of the Chinese soldier, his grandson said.

Early in his stay here, General Stilwell wrote, "The Chinese soldier best
exemplifies the greatness of the Chinese people — their indomitable spirit,
their uncomplaining loyalty, their honesty of purpose, their steadfast
perseverance."

[Source: By Jane Perlez, The New York Times, Chongqing, 23Feb16]

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